Panels

Lisa E. Bloom is the author of “Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions”(U of Minnesota P, 1993), which is the first critical book to date on the Arctic and Antarctic written from a feminist perspective. The book is an interdisciplinary study that examines the ways that nation, gender and science intertwine to create the modern polar regions. She is the editor of “With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture”(U of Minnesota P, 1999; Japanese translation; Saiki-sha, 2000), an anthology that examines how multiculturalism and feminism influence the arts, based on the proceedings of a conference she organized at San Francisco State University in 1997. She is also the author of J”ewish Identities in US Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity” (Routledge, London, 2006), which explores the place of Jewishness in feminist art in the United States.

She is currently writing a new book tentatively titled “Contemporary Art and Climate Change: The Aesthetics of Disappearance at the Poles” that focuses on how artistic practices are re-visualizing the Arctic and Antarctic and the ways artists are responding to the issues of global environmental change and this new competition over natural resources and marine routes. The book discusses work that challenge reigning assumptions about art – what form it might take, what effects it might have, how it might even be read as scientific “data” – as well as the ways it points beyond policymaking to imagine a future that takes seriously the consequences of climate change on our oceans, our weather, our built environments and the increasing vulnerabilities of our bodies to these changes.

Lisa E. Bloom is an adjunct Professor in the Communication Dept. at University of California, San Diego. She has both an M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop and Rochester Institute of Technology (1985), and a Ph. D. from the History of Consciousness Board at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1990). For more detailed information on her work, visit her website at: www.lisabloom.net or www.lisaebloom.com.